MAS NMR experiments of corynebacterial cell walls: Complementary 1H- and CPMAS CryoProbe-enhanced 13C-detected experiments

Bacterial cell walls are gigadalton-large cross-linked polymers with a wide range of motional amplitudes, including rather rigid as well as highly flexible parts. Magic-angle spinning NMR is a powerful method to obtain atomic-level information about intact cell walls. Here we investigate sensitivity and information content of different homonuclear ¹³C¹³C and heteronuclear ¹H¹⁵N, ¹H¹³C and ¹⁵N¹³C correlation experiments. We demonstrate that a CPMAS CryoProbe yields ca. 8-fold increased signal-to-noise over a room-temperature probe, or a ca. 3–4-fold larger per-mass sensitivity. The increased sensitivity allowed to obtain high-resolution spectra even on intact bacteria. Moreover, we compare resolution and sensitivity of ¹H MAS experiments obtained at 100 kHz vs. 55 kHz. Our study provides useful hints for choosing experiments to extract atomic-level details on cell-wall samples.